Having trouble? This is how to make affirmations actually work for you.

I’ve used affirmations for as long as I can remember to attempt rewriting the deep fear conditioning that I was taught in my early life. I was absolutely terrified of going to bed alone, because I feared my parents would be gone in the morning. I was deeply afraid of being abandoned. If my mothers car wasn’t parked outside of my piano lesson when I came out of the room, I’d panic in the waiting room. This went on until I was about 6 years old, when my mom finally decided it was time to bring me to a pyschologist. My tendency to go to a fear thought is strong. The worry groove in my brain was dug deep at the most fundamental brain developmental time in my life. It’s a part of my story. I spent a lot of time being angry at my parents for letting my grandparents raise me as they worked. I longed for my mom my entire infancy. My dad traveled all the time for work and I had a photo of him golfing taped next to my bed. I missed him all the time. How could I not blame them for who I am now, and all the fear and pain that I feel? How could I not blame them for my inability to trust others and feel safe? These questions led me to my first steps of healing, and taking these steps set the groundwork for my subsequent insights to actually take hold.
If you are reciting a sentence to yourself over and over, hoping you’ll wake up one day and feel completely differently, you’ll be waiting a while. There is groundwork to be done to set the foundation, before any affirmation will actually be accepted by your subconscious. Let’s set the groundwork.

1. Take responsibility for everything that comes through you and into your experience. Blame is a big word, a big emotion. But if we go beyond just the emotion, it is actually a state of being. If you are in blame, you cannot be in sovereignty. If you are in blame, you are not in control. You have decided (albeit subconsciously) that your happiness and joy is unattainable because someone else has taken it away. Therefore you are not in control of yourself, someone else is. That is a dangerous game to play, because counting on others to show up exactly how we need them to in order to be ok, will not happen most of the time. Does this mean that we should not be ok, most of the time? Most of humanity is acting in a state of reaction to their own traumas, and therefore cannot show up fully and lovingly most of the time. In order to set a good groundwork for ourselves, it is imperative to consciously reclaim power over our own state.
2. Choose happiness. Once you have the understanding that how you perceive your experiences is what shapes your experience, you can consciously choose joy. Triggers come up ALL THE TIME. I call triggers catalysts because how you use a catalyst will determine which direction it will propel you in. Everything is catalyst, from the biggest experience to the smallest. From the least triggering to the most. It’s all an opportunity to return to love. Someone cuts you off, you want to yell and blame and honk, but in that instant you remember that you read this random entry on medium and decide that you will, in real time, look at the urge to react and CONSCIOUSLY DECIDE TO LAUGH INSTEAD. You broke a pattern, and ingrained in yourself just a little bit more that you do in fact have power over your reactions. In every moment, you can build upon this faith and continue to choose happiness, no matter how others behave around you. Because your happiness, is YOUR choice.
3. Forgiveness. This comes next. It is so important to cultivate an awareness that people are suffering all around you, because they have not done this courageous work. And under that umbrella of people are your parents, are your teachers, every questionable driver on the road and whoever else that you have blamed for the person you have become. With parents, theres a tendency to not be able to accept that they're human. They should know better. How dare they not know. Here’s the truth. Most of humanity just doesn’t know. From this deep understanding comes forgiveness, which can later morph to compassion if cultivated.
4. Once you’ve taken responsibility for your own state and have reached a state of compassion for others who go around acting from their hurt place, you can probably begin feeling that, inside of you, there is an essence. This essence is the place inside of you that you can choose to go to instead of reacting. It’s from this place that you can watch your urge to react, but you know by now, by how many times you have decided to not react, that this place is always available to you as the immeasurably better alternative. Every time you choose this place over reaction and blame, you cultivate more and more trust in your essence. In who you are. In love.

So now that we’ve set the groundwork, where do affirmations come in? Well. We have pesky programming. Despite feeling connected to my essence a lot of the times, I still have fear thoughts that emerge. If my partner says something in a less than perfect way, I may have the thought that he doesn’t care about me and I need to flee. Your fear thoughts may come up sounding different, but in essence, they are the same. They are thoughts designed to “keep us safe,” and until this programming is addressed and over written, we will continue to have to consciously SHIFT from the thought to our essence. Affirmations give us the opportunity to reinstall NEW programming, programming chosen consciously, and based in love. The voice in our head (ego) is a sneaky bugger and can be very convincing. With affirmations, we can get it to work in PARTNERSHIP with our essence, with our hearts, rather than as a hindrance.
These are the affirmations that I have written to get my mind and heart aligned, take them if they speak to you or add onto them if they are missing anything that feels right:

I am the vast awareness that I feel inside of me.
I am the expansive awareness that always chooses to smile at inaccurate thoughts whilst returning to the truth.
I am the awareness that knows and understands that all is one, and loves so deeply that joy is always present.
This is who I am at all times.
Love and openness are my default settings.
Anything that isn’t that, is an illusion.
I smile at its attempts at keeping me safe, and come back to my centre.
I love my humanity.
I befriend my tendencies to think certain thoughts.
I know I’ve been frightened in the past, however I know the truth now.
Love is what keeps me safe.
When fear thoughts arise, I return to my loving centre and open further.
When I feel like closing, I love deeper.
Any inkling to shut down, cracks my heart open.
I embrace catalysts, because despite providing me with challenges, they are the experiences that allow me the opportunity to choose love, over and over again.
And each time I do, it becomes more easeful.
Each time I do, I get closer to enlightenment.